05 March 2015

in praise of text

"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything."
~~jonathan libov

each weekday, i receive an email called "real future" by alexis madrigal. it used to be called "5 intriguing things", which is a more descriptive title and although i'd only received a couple week's worth of the daily emails when alexis took a new job and changed the name of the newsletter, i still suffer from wistful nostalgia every single day.

see, the newsletter contains... wait for it... 5 intriguing things! alexis scours the raw internet plus tips he receives by email, pulls out 5 intriguing stories, compiles them into a blog post which goes through one of those auto-feed things and becomes an email which zooms through the ether and lands in my email box.

so every day, five somethings different, interesting, short + sweet, each with a blurb and a link to the full article. it only takes a few moments to read the whole thing. the problem is when you see something you want to read more of. well, not problem exactly, but like, if you budgeted a minute to read the email, if you get tempted and follow a link, now you have blown your budget all to hell.

that's what happened to me on 2 march. the first link carried the blurb i copied in above. i read it and was immediately hooked because the concept of text has been rumbling around in my brain lately.

it's like this:

right up until 564 years ago, when ol' johannes gutenberg got his printing press all put together and operational, widespread literacy was not a thing. i'd venture to say, even narrowspread literacy was not a thing. without the written word, how did people communicate, you are wondering? well, they told stories, drew pictures, sang songs, lots of mime and hand signals, semaphores.

before literacy, words were sounds that conjured mental images, feelings, impressions, smells, sights. now we are literate with all our high-falutin letters symbolizing those sounds, forming plain words in our brain, words disconnected from images, words we never taste with our mouths.

the very act of becoming literate distances us from the words we are so hungry to consume.

but that's where we are. that's what we have. text. it's kind of depressing.

but then someone comes along and EXTOLS it. freaking sings the praises of meager, simple little text, little etched lines and dots, little slants and squiggles. it's socially useful! multi-modal! asynchronous! can be searched and indexed - even by hand! text can be corrected, branched, annotated, quoted, reviewed, summarized.

underlying all text is a power, and that power is in the structure, and that structure facilitates the universal acceptance of text.

THE BREADTH, SCALE, AND DEPTH OF WAYS PEOPLE USE TEXT IS UNMATCHED BY ANYTHING. WELL SAID MR LIBOV.







so, basically, i am thrilled. i click the link to read more.

http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text

go ahead.

click it.

read more.

and then come back here and tell me what you think.

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